Paul Martin pitches his fight for First Nations education at AFN

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin was already a divisive guest at the Assembly of First Nations annual meeting before he took the stage in Montreal Thursday.

He’s focused on the issue of First Nations education for almost a decade, studying to improve standards and fighting for funding for on-reserve schools.

“You can’t do it by seeking to amend Ottawa’s proposed structures for First Nations education. You do it by setting out your own. You don’t wait for Ottawa’s experts to tell you what they can do,” said Martin.

“You do it by having First Nations education experts speak, being among the best in the country, and make sure they’re heard from across the land,” he said.

He provided the example of two six-year-old kids, at two different schools 10km apart, getting completely different educations if one is on a reserve, with that student receiving 40 per cent less government funding to learn.

He discussed three programs he’s helped start that need support, through community involvement and financial backing by the government.

One is a program that trains the principals of reserve schools how to do as much as they can with the little to no funding they receive. The pilot class will begin this September in conjunction with the University of Toronto Education program.

“How in heavens name can anybody build a school system if they shudder every time the mail comes in, expecting yet another notice from Ottawa about funding being cut? It won’t work, you can’t do it and it’s not fair,” said Martin.

Another program was the reappropriation of an Ontario initiative to improve literacy rates among children, but done with consultation of First Nations education experts. It was hugely successful in the handful of schools it was developed in, bringing the literacy rate up from 13 per cent among aboriginal children to 70 per cent in only four years, on par with their Canadian counterparts – and in the case of young girls, slightly ahead.

“Will the funding that’s required to bring First Nations education [funding] to its proper level be costly? Of course it will in the short term. But it’ll be a heck of a lot less costly than what we see today, with young lives being wasted.”

But Martin’s attendance was a sticky point for some, unhappy to have the prime minister responsible for the “temporary” two per cent cap to First Nations education funding come now and tell aboriginal people they need to get Canadians help to force the government to properly fund schools on reserves.

The two per cent cap, the elimination of which is a common election promise of Opposition leaders, was never meant to be a long-term limit on funding, but when the Martin government was defeated in 2006 and the Harper government failed to support the Kelowna Accord, the temporary “fix” became a semi-permanent fixture.

“And five billion dollars, meant to fill the gaps of education and other areas, was diverted elsewhere,” says Martin, who described the Harper government’s approach to First Nations funding as “our way or the highway”.

While he was the only speaker Thursday afternoon, he was joined on stage by now Liberal candidate Jodie Wilson-Raybould, formerly the Regional Chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations, who is running in the riding of Vancouver-Granville.

The theme of First Nations education funding was also shared by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who featured it prominently in his speech to the AFN assembly Tuesday.